Ground Zero(31)

“Pasoon?” Reshmina called.

She didn’t understand. One minute, Pasoon had been right in front of her, and the next—poof. He was gone. But how? The path they’d been following stretched slowly and steadily up the hill. You could see up to the next ridge, and all the way down into the ravine below. And there were no big rocks or trees for Pasoon to hide behind.

“Pasoon, you son of a donkey!” Reshmina cried. “Where did you go?” She spun, looking all around, but Pasoon had completely disappeared. Reshmina started to panic. If she lost him, if he found the Taliban before she’d been able to talk him out of it—

Reshmina started up the path. If Pasoon had somehow made it up the long hill while she wasn’t looking, she would see him from the top of the ridge. She ran halfway there, then stopped. No, there was no way Pasoon could have sprinted all that way in the few seconds she hadn’t been looking. It was too far.

He has to be around here somewhere, Reshmina thought.

But where?

Reshmina came back down the path to where she’d planted the seed and opened her senses. She scanned the terrain in minute detail, lingering over every rock, every bush. She listened for the slightest sounds on the wind: a snapping twig, a scuffling footstep, an accidental rockfall.

Nothing.

But then—tink—Reshmina caught the smallest metallic sound, almost no louder than her heartbeat. She wouldn’t have even heard it if she hadn’t been listening so hard.

The sound had come from a steep wall of rock along the path. She moved closer to the wall, listening. Watching. But there’s nothing here! she thought. She put her hands to the rock face, as though there was some kind of secret door Pasoon had walked through. But no.

Reshmina sighed and looked down at her feet. Wait—were those the faint marks of shoes in the dirt? She crouched down low. It was only when she put her head almost all the way to the ground that she saw it beneath the rocky overhang.

The entrance to a cave.

Pasoon, that sneaky rat! The Afghan mountains were full of hidden caves like this. Some caves were no bigger than the snow leopards who liked to sleep in them, but others went deep into the mountains, carved out long ago by ancient waters and smoothed into hiding places by decades of jihad fighters. Pasoon must have known the cave was there and waited until she wasn’t looking to scramble inside.

The entrance was just big enough for a grown person to squeeze through, and Reshmina wiggled inside. Beyond the entrance there was room to sit up, and then stand—but it was pitch-black and cold in the cave. She waited for her eyes to adjust, but it was too dark. There was only a sliver of light from the entrance to orient herself.

“Pasoon?” Reshmina whispered. The little toad had to be in here somewhere. He could be standing right next to her, for all she knew. But the cave might also go deep within the mountain.

She was going to have to go farther inside to find out.

Reshmina put her hands out in front of her, feeling her way through the darkness. Almost immediately she ran into something about thigh level, and her heart caught in her throat. Wood scraped softly against rock, and there was a clink of glass. A small table, maybe? With something on it? She felt tentatively in the dark. Yes, a table—and in the middle of it, a lantern! She could tell from its shape. And if there was a lantern, there might be …

She patted the tabletop until she found it. A small plastic lighter!

Reshmina struck the flint on the lighter, and suddenly she could see her hands. She squinted in the glare. There was a glass lamp on the table like the one Reshmina’s family had at home, and this lamp still had oil in it. Reshmina lit the wick, and a warm glow cast light all around her.

Something was stacked against the smooth walls of the cave just beyond the edge of her light, and Reshmina stepped closer with the lantern to see what it was.

Weapons. The cave was filled with them. Rifles. RPGs. Boxes of bullets. Unburied land mines. The metallic sound Reshmina had heard outside must have been Pasoon tripping over a weapon in the dark.

Reshmina brought the lantern down for a closer look. The weapons were made by many different countries. She recognized some of the languages written on the weapons, and others she guessed at: English, Russian, French, German, Spanish, Korean, Chinese. No Pashto or Arabic though. Afghanistan didn’t make the weapons. They just bought them and shot them. It was the big countries that made money selling weapons to the little countries. Who they killed with those weapons wasn’t any of the big countries’ concern.

What would happen, Reshmina wondered, if the big countries stopped selling weapons to the little countries? How would Afghanistan and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and Iran and the countries around them fight each other and the rest of the world? With bows and arrows? Swords? Rocks? Fists?

Maybe, Reshmina thought, they wouldn’t fight at all. Maybe they would spend their time doing something else instead, like building factories and schools and hospitals.

But that was never going to happen, and Reshmina knew it. She knew too, as a chill ran down her back, that what she was looking at right now was a Taliban weapons cache—a big one.

Reshmina turned, and there was Pasoon, standing right next to her. He’d appeared out of nowhere, like a ghost. Reshmina screamed, and Pasoon lunged for the lantern. Reshmina jumped, and the lantern clattered to the floor.

Krissh! The glass lantern shattered, and—fwoomp—the spilled oil ignited.